Martin UpstagedIrishDrama 2007

Princeton University Library
Upstaged: Irish Drama in Irish

Author(s): Richard P. Martin
Source: The Princeton University Library Chronicle , Vol. 68, No. 1-2 (Winter 2007), pp.
82-114
Published by: Princeton University Library
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.68.1-2.0082
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Upstaged
I r is h D r a m a i n I r is h
richard p. martin
“
I RISH DRAMA” for most readers means the early-twentieth-
century masterpieces of John Millington Synge and William Butler
Yeats, Sean O’Casey and Bernard Shaw. Mid-century tragicomedies
by Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan show up in anthologies bear-
ing the title. More recently, the description attaches itself to a string of
brilliant plays by Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, and Marina Carr—
works that are known far beyond Ireland, often performed, and form
parts of an educational as well as theatrical canon. “Drama in Irish”
is another story, less often told, less compelling from the viewpoint of
literary achievement, but for its social and political complications all
the more intriguing.
The story offers more than a few paradoxes. First, Ireland boasts
the oldest attested vernacular literature in Europe, predating the ear-
liest Old English writing by several centuries ; but the first drama in
the native tongue was staged, as far as we know, little more than a
century ago. Moreover, until the collapse of the Gaelic order in the
seventeenth century, Ireland was aswarm with professional literary
men and women ; yet the first plays in Irish of which we have record
were written by amateurs in the late nineteenth century, most of them
descendants of the English colonizers who contributed, consciously
or not, to the language’s decline. Finally, productions in Irish, though
often depicting subsistence living on the western shores where Irish
still manages to survive, have traditionally played to an urban middle
class (in this regard, not unlike most “Irish” plays in English).
The late appearance of drama in Irish can be attributed to a num-
ber of causes. Rather than approach it as a deficiency, however, as if
the development of drama were a universal cultural imperative that
in Ireland somehow failed to ignite, we might reflect on the oddity
and idiosyncracy of the whole phenomenon of theater. From the eth-
nographer’s standpoint, every culture has some variety of mimetic
play. But only a limited number have the configuration we have come
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to call “drama” : fiction in the form of scripted dialogue, role-playing
actors, set places and times for productions, a nonparticipating audi-
ence (as distinct from a group of companions or kin), props, costumes,
producers, directors, rehearsals, critical judgments, and sometimes
awards. These components of theater in the European tradition first
came together in Athens in the sixth century bce, under conditions
that remain frustratingly obscure. Two millennia later, at the other
end of the continent, theater in this form was still a novelty, if it was
known at all. When it did take root, such “drama” was an invasive
species, an offshoot of the ancient Greek creation, with some medi-
eval growths.
The Hellenic analogy can be extended. Before the great wave of
anglicization of the sixteenth century, Irish performance traditions
seem to have resembled those of Greece in the centuries before the
invention of Athenian drama, when local tyrannoi (unelected absolute
rulers) gained fame through their support of poet-musicians like Anac-
reon, Ibycus, and Arion. For generations, bards and satirists, histo-
rians and harpers, pipers, jesters, and mimes throve in the scores of
local royal courts belonging to the great Irish clans. Like their early
Greek analogues, they served primarily to praise, lend authority to,
and entertain kings—audiences of one.
Since the nineteenth century, scholars have known that such
Irish verbal art has close cognates in cultures speaking other Indo-
European languages (including ancient India, Rome, Scandinavia,
and Greece).1 Some phrases in bardic poetry show such close affini-
ties to non-Irish parallels that they—and the aristocratic ideology of
war craft and patronage they enshrine—are thought to descend from
a period when Indo-European speakers were in linguistic and cultural
unity, perhaps around 3000 bce in the central Asian steppes.2 In Ath-
ens, the rise of democracy in the late sixth century short-circuited the
inherited institutions of aristocratic patronage. Poets became in effect
temporary employees of the state, and wealthy citizens became state-
appointed dramatic producers. In Ireland, one could argue, a similar
sociopolitical stage was reached only with the creation of the Free
State in 1922.
1
See J. E. Caerwyn Williams and Patrick K. Ford, The Irish Literary Tradition (Car-
diff : University of Wales Press, 1992), 41–49.
2
Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon : Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York :
Oxford University Press, 1995), is an excellent introduction to these concepts.
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Given the fundamental difference in social conditions, and the cul-
tural chasm opened by anglicization, it is hopeless to look for the roots
of modern Gaelic drama in the performance types reported by medi-
eval Irish records. The impression one gets in reading them is not so
much of lost opportunities for the development of a genre, as it is of
the strangeness and richness of lost artistic expression. Alan Fletcher’s
monumental study of such arts offers glimpses of highly organized en-
tertainment, with multiple media and forms interacting, whether in
public venues (fairs, feasts, processions) or semiprivate spaces (royal
halls).3 The early-eighth-century law tract Críth Gablach (Branched
Purchase) describes the proper arrangement of the king’s retinue
when at table, with the privileged poets sitting next to harpers, pipers
a bit removed to the hall’s southwest corner, over by the horn players,
while tricksters and acrobats are deployed in other spots, and the king
takes his place at the east wall. The early manual Lánellach Tigi Rích
agus Ruirech (Full Complement of the Hall of a King and Overking)
further specifies that buffoons and satirists be stationed at the door-
posts (an effective verbal deterrent to gate-crashers ?).4 The drúth , or
fool, seems to have been a jack-of-all-performance-trades, including
juggling, while professional farters (braigetóiri ) represented the height
of specialization in mass entertainment for the crowds.
What most annoyed authorities were the traveling performers, out-
side the rule of any one royal court, who exercised their age-old privi-
lege of preying on the public by offering song, poem, or story for a
price. Archbishop John Colton of Armagh, in synodal statutes dating
from the late fourteenth century, legislated “contra mimos ioculatores
poetas timpanistas sive citharedas & praecipue contra kernarios ac
importunas & improbos donorum petitores quin verius extortores”
(against mimes [correcting the ms minos], jugglers, poets, drummers,
or harpers and especially kerns and bothersome, rascally “seekers of
gifts”—rather, more truly, extortionists).5 The frequency of similar
enactments over the centuries before Cromwell attests to the tenacity
of these cultural expressions.
3
Alan J. Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland : A Repertory
of Sources and Documents from the Earliest Times until c. 1642 (Cambridge : D. S. Brewer,
2001).
4
Texts in Daniel A. Binchy, Críth Gablach (Dublin : Stationery Office, 1941), 23,
and Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 146, 153.
5
Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 432.
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The threat posed by such entertainers can be directly related to the
much-feared power of satire in a largely oral culture. In this world
“face” meant as much if not more than achievement, and a person’s
reputation depended on the circulation of fame by performers (who
in turn praise the one who pays). The role of the griot in medieval and
modern West Africa provides a good parallel. In this charged climate,
it is not hard to see how organized players, as in an acting troupe, and
a regular public venue, like a theater, would constitute even greater
dangers to local royal or clerical authority—perhaps another reason
why “drama” in our sense did not flower.
The records of English-language plays performed in Ireland ante-
date Irish dramas by nearly three centuries. In 1628, Much Ado about
Nothing—apparently the play of that name by Shakespeare—was set
to be produced in Coleraine (County Londonderry) for the entertain-
ment of His Majesty’s commissioners, but had to be canceled when
the players learned that certain songs in it might offend the visiting
officials.6 In 1635, John Ogilby, Master of the Revels for Ireland,
opened a public theater in Werburgh Street, Dublin, “and did ef-
fectually reduce the publick presentacions of tragedies and comedies
to the proper and harmeles use whereby those recreacions formerly
obnoxious were made inoffensive. . . .” 7 Further back in time, from
at least the fourteenth century on, the English-speaking crowds of
Dublin and a few other towns could enjoy liturgical dramas, proces-
sions, and pageants at Easter, Christmas, Midsummer, and the feast
of Corpus Christi.8
Any staged drama in Ireland was a product of the towns, but Irish
speakers lived in (and de facto if not de lege were restricted to) the coun-
tryside. The first organized towns in Ireland had been Viking foun-
dations. The Anglo-Norman takeover, starting in the twelfth cen-
tury, continued the trend toward separation of languages based on
landscape, with non-Irish speakers inhabiting the coastal cities and
the major towns within the “Pale” (the pacified area around Dublin).
This division was never a matter of apartheid. The rich linguistic and
ethnic mix that formed modern Ireland simply did not extend so far
as to include the adaptation of French, Norse, or English dramatic
6
Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 210 and 526n.193.
7
Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 486 ; the quotation is from a royal patent
of 1661.
8
Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 61–125, 161–96.
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traditions by the native Irish. With the final collapse of the Gaelic po-
litical and cultural order in the seventeenth century, whatever native
performers might once have served as conduits for foreign genres lost
patronage and status. Traditional poets eventually became masters of
hedge schools, passing on their dwindling stores of native and Clas-
sical learning to future farmers.9 Although the verbal culture of this
“hidden Ireland” was rich in many genres, dramatic expression was
not one of them.10
Only with the cultural revivals of the nineteenth century did staged
drama in Irish emerge as an artistic possibility, and even then its aims
were not primarily or purely aesthetic. Much as one might desire to
discover an indigenous source for the Gaelic version of theater, it is
inescapable that the first dramas produced in the Irish language were
inspired and constructed by politically-minded intellectuals steeped in
Continental dramatic traditions, often people of Anglo-Irish heritage
whose primary language was English. We can recover more of the
paradox and nuance of what ensued by subdividing the development
into three categories, based on the playwrights and their contexts. Let
us call them teachers, hybrids, and “natives.” It is worth emphasiz-
ing that however immersed in the language—even as a “native”—no
Irish dramatist from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has
ever operated in a purely Gaelic environment : players, producers, au-
diences, and publishers have in this period always been bilingual and
bicultural. After all, by 1891, after decades of famine, emigration,
suppression, and neglect, the total number of those in Ireland who
could speak the indigenous language at all was only 680,000, or 14.5
percent of the whole population. And the number who spoke no other
language but Irish was estimated to be about 38,000, representing
only 0.8 percent of the island’s inhabitants.11
9
See P. J. Dowling, The Hedge Schools of Ireland (London : Longmans, Green,
1935).
10
We should not ignore traditional customs such as “mumming” plays, the skit
performances of Wren Boys, and other unscripted para-dramatic events, but these
differ in their social role from the institution of theater. The intersection between
such forms and modern stage drama deserves further study. On mumming and re-
lated forms in one county where they survive, see Diarmaid Ó Muirithe and Deirdre
Nuttall, eds., Folklore of County Wexford (Dublin : Four Courts Press, 1999), 47–59.
11
Reg Hindley, The Death of the Irish Language : A Qualified Obituary (London : Rout-
ledge, 1990), 19.
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The categories that I propose can be aligned to some extent with
three historical stages : the Celtic revival, cresting in the 1890s ; the
development of an independent nation-state (1918–1960) ; and the
entry of that state (some would say “re-entry”) into global high cul-
ture (1960s–present). Graphically, the three periods can be sketched
as a sharp peak upward, a long dip, and a slightly higher, steady hori-
zontal line. In what follows, I shall concentrate on the first era, leav-
ing the latter two for briefer comment.
teachers
“We are anxious to get plays in Irish,” W. B. Yeats wrote in 1900,

“and can we do so will very possibly push our work into the western
counties, where it would be an important help to that movement for
the revival of the Irish language on which the life of the nation may
depend.” Ever the dreamer, the editor of the literary magazine Bel-
taine could pen this wish in the belief that talent and opportunity were
on his side.12 Not his talent—for Yeats (1865–1939), though a success-
ful poet and dramatist at thirty-five, was not able to compose in Irish.
But he had friends who might carry out the idea, among them Lady
Gregory (1852–1932) and Douglas Hyde (1860 –1949), the latter a
prime player in the language movement that Yeats wished to encour-
age through theater productions. Yeats, as a later acquaintance was to
write from personal experience, “tended to regard literature as a sort
of co-operative activity, and was incensed by people who refused to
join the co-operative.” 13
As it turned out, the young poet went on to concentrate on creat-
ing a new form of English-language theater, “remote, spiritual, and
ideal,” a mimesis of ritual, “recalling words to their ancient sover-
eignty.” 14 Meanwhile, playwriting in Irish began in a very different
style, to some extent helped along by the ascetic dramatist, but mainly
with the inspiration of co-operative movements, including the Gaelic
League (Conradh na Gaeilge) and the Daughters of Erin (Inghinidhe
12
Yeats in Beltaine, no. 2 (February 1900), 4 ; reprinted in Beltaine : The Organ of the
Irish Literary Theatre ; Number One to Number Three, May 1899–April 1900, English Little
Magazines, 15 (London : Cass, 1970).
13
Frank O’Connor, A Short History of Irish Literature : A Backward Look (New York :
Capricorn, 1968), 168.
14
Yeats, Beltaine, no. 1 (May 1899), 21, 23.
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na hÉireann). Such organizations brought together language revival-
ists, self-help enthusiasts, and young political thinkers whose hopes for
greater national autonomy had been cut off by the death of Charles
Stewart Parnell in 1891 and the parliamentary defeat of Home Rule
two years later.15
The first president of the Gaelic League, Hyde was, like Yeats, a
middle-class Protestant by birth and a man in search of a broader
cultural horizon. Their acquaintance dated back to Hyde’s under-
graduate years. Both were involved in founding the Irish National
Literary Society in Dublin in 1892. In one of the club’s first lectures,
“On the Necessity for de-Anglicising the Irish People,” Hyde began
his remarks in Irish—the first time, in the recollection of the hundred
people present, that the language had been used on a public occa-
sion.16 By the next year, when he and Eoin MacNéill established the
new society for revitalizing Irish, Hyde had completed two bilingual
collections of folklore materials, the prose tales of Beside the Fire (1890)
and The Love Songs of Connacht (1893). In that same year Yeats pub-
lished his romanticized folkloric tales, The Celtic Twilight. The poet’s
previous collection, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888),
owed a good deal to Hyde’s aid and model, as he acknowledged.17
Unlike Yeats, who never picked up the language, Hyde had learned
Irish in his teenage years from servants and neighbors while living in
Roscommon. He went on to study its earlier history while at Trinity
College Dublin and in his subsequent work largely invented a style of
translating Irish speech into English while retaining the syntax and
idioms of the original—a powerful influence on the prose and dramas
of Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge.
It was the authors’ acquaintance with Lady Gregory that propelled
both Yeats’s symbolist drama and Hyde’s peasant plays onto the stage.
Yeats met her in 1896, a year before Hyde did. The story of their
15
On the web of co-operative movements, see P. J. Mathews, Revival : The Abbey
Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Notre Dame : Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press, 2003), and, on the broader historical context, F. S. L.
Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1979),
27–55.
16
Georg Grote, Torn between Politics and Culture : The Gaelic League, 1893–1993 (Mün-
ster and New York : Waxmann, 1994), 19.
17
Brenna Katz Clarke, The Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play at the Abbey Theatre (Ann
Arbor, Mich. : UMI Research Press, 1982), 88.
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Douglas Hyde. Photograph from Irish Literature, ed. Justin McCarthy et al., vol. 4
(Philadelphia : J. D. Morris and Company, 1904), opposite 1602. Princeton Univer-
sity Library.
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conversations with her Galway neighbor, the littérateur Edward Mar-
tyn, about the need for a new Irish drama, and the eventual outcome,
the Irish Literary Theatre, is well known.18 Hyde’s research into the
life and art of the blind folk poet of Connacht, Anthony Raftery (An-
toine Ó Reachtabhra, ca. 1748–1835), led to his own first meeting,
at Martyn’s house, with the great lady of Coole Park. Lady Gregory
had collected Raftery stories herself, and had admired Hyde’s Love
Songs. The book made her realize that, “while I had thought poetry
was all but dead in Ireland, the people about me had been keeping up
the lyrical tradition that existed in Ireland before Chaucer lived.” 19
Their similar Ascendancy backgrounds and nationalist interests made
for a natural alliance. Hyde soon undertook to guide Lady Gregory’s
efforts at learning Irish, while she supported his Gaelic League and
brought him into her circle of literary friends.20
Lady Gregory was later to date the birth of Irish drama in the na-
tive tongue to a Punch and Judy show put on by Hyde and his friend
Norma Borthwick in December 1898 for the annual schoolchildren’s
Christmas party at the Coole gatehouse. Following the entertain-
ment, “the delighted children went back to tell their parents what
grand curses An Craoibhín [Hyde’s Gaelic pen name, An Craoibhín
Aoibhinn, “delightful little branch”] had put on the baby and the po-
liceman.” 21 Hyde’s biographers correct the record slightly : one act of
a historical drama, The Passing of Conall, turned into Irish verse, had
in fact been performed one month before at a festival in Letterkenny,
Donegal, attended by both Hyde and Borthwick.22 The production of
18
See Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (New York : G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1913) ;
Mary Lou Kohfeldt, Lady Gregory : The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance (New York :
Atheneum, 1985) ; Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 3–6.
19
Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers : Studies and Translations from the Irish (Dublin :
Hodges, Figgis, 1903), 47. This volume also contains (pp. 1–46) the fruits of her in-
quiries about Raftery.
20
On Hyde’s acquaintance with Lady Gregory, see Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde,
ed. Gareth W. Dunleavy and Janet Egleson Dunleavy (Washington, D.C. : Catho-
lic University of America Press, 1991), 13. On her involvement in Irish studies, see
Maureen Murphy, “Lady Gregory and the Gaelic League,” in Lady Gregory, Fifty
Years After, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross : Colin Smythe, 1987), 143–62.
21
Gregory, Poets and Dreamers, 196.
22
Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 14. The text of The Passing of Conall is in Robert Hogan
and James Kilroy, The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899–1901, vol. 1 of The Modern Irish
Drama : A Documentary History (Dublin : Dolmen Press, 1975), 137–44. Clarke, Emergence
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such dramas was explicitly simple and didactic. Alice Milligan (1865–
1953), a nationalist newspaper editor and playwright, in reporting the
Letterkenny event in January 1899, predicted that the next annual
festival of the Gaelic League “will likely be the occasion of a dramatic
entertainment in which the Irish language alone will be used, and
which at the same time, will be instructive and attractive to those who
only understand English and other foreign languages.” 23
The same atmosphere of amateur entertainment and nationalist
pedagogy surrounded Hyde’s first and most celebrated theatrical play,
Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope). The encouraging hos-
pitality of Lady Gregory provided the occasion, and Yeats—as Hyde
recorded in his diary—gave the immediate impetus : “28 August
1900. Yeats set me writing a play on ‘The Twisting of the Rope,’ and
I wrote a good part of it from the scenario he drew up for me.” The
play was finished within two days, read out to Martyn after dinner
one evening, and dictated to Lady Gregory, who typed it in English
on August 31.24 The sociolinguistic details catch the eye : although
Hyde composed the play in Irish, most of his circle at Coole Park that
summer could critique it only in translation.25 Casadh an tSúgáin made
history as the first play in Irish ever produced at a professional theater.
of the Irish Peasant Play, 202n.102, notes that Hyde’s drama was also preceded by the
Gaelic League production of Tadhg Saor (Free Tim) by Father Peadar Ó Laoghaire,
staged in Macroom in May 1900, and by An Tobar Draoidheachta (The Well of Enchant-
ment) of Father Patrick Dinneen, produced the same year. See also Karen Vande-
velde, The Alternative Dramatic Revival in Ireland, 1897–1913 (Dublin : Maunsel, 2005),
43–48.
23
In the Daily Express, January 21, 1899, quoted by Pádraig Ó Siadhail, Stair
Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge 1900–1970 (Inverin : Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 1993), 21. The
Passing of Conall, according to Milligan, had been written in English by Father Eu-
gene O’Growney (1863–1899), a Gaelic League organizer then living in the west-
ern United States ; the Irish translation was done by Patrick O’Byrne of Killybegs,
an emigrant returned from New York. See Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge,
20n.11 and 21. On further Irish-American aspects to the early development of Irish
drama, see note 31 below.
24
Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 8. The quotation from Hyde’s diary is in Clarke,
Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 90.
25
Lady Gregory later translated plays of Hyde with his advice and with varying
results ; see Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 23–26. It is not clear how much of this first
effort she could have understood on her own. Maureen Murphy believes her Irish
was quite good from 1897 on ; see Murphy, “Lady Gregory and the Gaelic League,”
143.
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Presented at the Gaiety in Dublin on October 21, 1901, as part of the
third season of the Irish Literary Theatre, it was a great success.
In just a few years, the Gaelic League had attracted thousands of
members to its branches in villages and towns all over Ireland, so
there was a ready audience of passionate language learners. The pros-
pect of seeing the League’s president himself playing the lead role of
the roguish wandering poet contributed to the packed house each
night. Meanwhile, staging Casadh an tSúgáin required fundamental
changes in the Irish Literary Theatre’s practices that ultimately af-
fected acting styles, direction, and dramatic ideology for the next gen-
eration. First, George Moore, the novelist cousin of Edward Martyn,
had to be replaced as director. His cosmopolitan outlook and experi-
ence with professional actors from London had been a benefit when
in 1899 he worked with Yeats in producing The Countess Cathleen and
with Martyn for The Heather Field. But he did not have the skill to di-
rect amateurs speaking Irish. Second, the very necessity of using am-
ateurs (the professionals could not handle the language) meant that
the conventional voices and gestures of the late-nineteenth-century
acting tradition were replaced with a more natural, unlearned style.
Finally, the play’s theme and setting—a brief anecdote about a trav-
eling poet who is tricked and thrown out of a country dance when he
tries to woo the local beauty—paved the way for the popularity of the
“peasant play,” a subgenre that was to become a staple of the Abbey
Theatre in years to come.26 In sum, the success of Casadh an tSúgáin
lasted far beyond its brief October run.
The simple story of Hanrahan the poet, a Connacht man roam-
ing through Munster, was generated from materials familiar to Yeats,
Hyde, and their audience. Many details echo the lore about Raftery
and other folk poets of the early nineteenth century. At the same time,
the central conceit of the play—that no one dares eject Hanrahan
outright for fear of the poet’s curse—continues an age-old Irish belief
in the power of praise and blame. It is a nice paradox that Yeats—
whether in his symbolist, theosophist, or realist modes the furthest
fetch from a folk poet—was clearly attracted to the scenario and its
memory of times when verse making mattered. When Hanrahan is
deceived into teaching the locals how to twist a hay rope and, in the
26
On the other social and dramatic influences contributing to the success of the
peasant play, see Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play.
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manufacturing process, is shut out of the house, no darker meanings
may lurk : the clever farm folk can out-think a man of words ; Mun-
ster people get the last laugh on their rivals to the north. Yet it is sug-
gestive that the seductive and threatening poet figure (significantly
played by an actual poet-playwright, Hyde, put up to it by another
one, Yeats) ends up excluded from his dreams. Wittingly or not, the
theme links rural reality (the death of the last bards) and the urban
poet’s dilemma (the marginalization of the art). At the same time, it
must be conceded, the vagabond Hanrahan, not his stolid Munster
opponent Séamus, gets our attention, even sympathy, by enchant-
ing his audiences—the girl Úna and the theatergoers watching the
play—with his siren rhymes :
Atá na Muimhnigh seo dallta ag Dia,
Ní aithnid eala thar lacha liath,
Acht tiucfaidh sí liom-sa, mo Hélen bhreá
Mar a molfar a pearsa’s a sgéimh go bráth.
These Munstermen here God has blinded :
They don’t see the swan that’s beyond the grey duck.
But my fine Helen, she’s the one who’ll come with me,
Where her figure and beauty will forever be praised.27
The emotional high point of the little comedy is in fact a poetic

love duet recited by Hanrahan and the girl as they get up to dance,
with Hyde showing his skill in composing traditional eighteenth-
century verse. The final lines of the play stage another sort of duet.
Úna desperately begs for her romancing poet to be let back inside : “is
file é, is bárd é, is fear iontach é” (he’s a poet, a bard, a wonderful man).
Hanrahan, meanwhile, shouts rhythmic curses as he beats the door,
calling down on the Munstermen the wrath of poets, priests, widows,
and the pope. Séamus, the local man to whom Úna is engaged, can
only tell the neighbors who helped him eject the interloper, “She’ll be
thankful to ye tomorrow.” Whatever patriarchal overtones we might
now catch in this final elision of the female voice, we have the evi-
dence of several playgoers that the original crowd was drawn in, with
27
Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 50 ; translation mine. Lady Gregory translated the
first line as “These Munstermen do not understand half her courtesy,” most likely for
fear of causing offense. In Irish usage, “God” and “devil” figured in emphatic utter-
ance more frequently than they did in genteel English.
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the gallery singing along.28 The concatenation of genres in Hyde’s
creation must have worked to persuade audiences of its authenticity,
for each component of the fiction (dance, song, and folk rituals) would
have been familiar, at least secondhand.
Although feminine desire may have been squelched within Hyde’s
rendition, the staging of the play itself could not have happened with-
out a remarkable group of strong-willed women. The formidable Maud
Gonne, patriot, activist, muse, and love object for Yeats, headed the
Daughters of Erin, a women’s society inaugurated on Easter Monday
1900 with the aim of encouraging the study of the Irish language,
supporting Irish manufactures, and discouraging “low” English pub-
lications and entertainments.29 Gonne later wrote that the group “was
one of the first societies for open Revolutionary work, and we almost
stopped enlistment for the British Army in Dublin and considerably
reduced it throughout the country.” 30 Alongside the demonstrations
and shame tactics adopted by the Daughters to hobble the Boer War
effort went apparently less subversive activities : classes in language,
art, music, and drama for children and women. More conspicuous
were the group’s public tableaux vivants depicting events from Ireland’s
glorious (that is, pre-anglicized) past. In the atmosphere of the lin-
guistic and cultural revival, even distant subjects—the children of Lir,
or Brian Boru at Clontarf—carried powerful political messages, with-
out anyone onstage speaking a word.
The first set of tableaux, presented in Dublin on Easter Monday
1901 at the Antient Concert Rooms, included scenes from myth and
legend but also a stylized representation of a ceilidh, the traditional
communal dance party popular in the rural West. Such a setting fore-
shadowed the scenario for Casadh an tSúgáin. The second production,
in August of the same year, made a more ambitious effort to include
spoken dramas. Two plays were performed in Irish : Alice Milligan’s
historical play The Deliverance of Red Hugh, and P. T. McGinley’s Eilís
28
Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters : Political Performance and the Origins of the
Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse : Syracuse University Press, 2001), 31, quoting Ste-
phen Gwynn. On the issue of female agency, it is worth noting that the trick of using
the hay rope is conceived by Síghle, an older neighbor woman, but the generational
tension between matrons and maids is never made explicit.
29
Full text of the objectives is in Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 15.
30
The Autobiography of Maud Gonne : A Servant of the Queen, ed. A. Norman Jeffares and
Anna MacBride White (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1994), 268.
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agus an Bhean Déirce (Lizzy and the Beggar Woman), which featured,
significantly, an old tinker who puts a curse on a house after she is
tricked by country people.31 The Daughters of Erin supplied most of
the cast. The direction, however, was entrusted to an acquaintance of
Maud Gonne named Willie Fay, who with his brother Frank in 1892
started the amateur Ormond Dramatic Society and had acquired a
good deal of professional experience thereafter.32 Yeats was so im-
pressed with the style of acting at the August performances that he
eventually used a combination of the Ormond and Daughters com-
panies for his own “peasant” play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, which opened
in April 1902 (with Maud Gonne as the lead). Meanwhile, he hired
Willie Fay to replace George Moore as the director for the October
1901 production of Casadh an tSúgáin, the actors for which were Irish
speakers (or learners) drawn from the Keating Branch of the Gaelic
League.
“Dr. Hyde’s play . . . pleased everybody,” wrote Yeats in the next
season’s number of his occasional review Samhain, adding that the
drama “did much toward making plays a necessary part in Irish pro-
paganda.” 33 Not quite. On the very day that Hyde’s play opened,
a precocious nineteen-year-old undergraduate at University Col-
lege Dublin published an essay attacking Yeats’s Irish Literary The-
atre and (by implication) the turn toward simple Irish acting on the
stage as part of a compromise with artistic mediocrity and vulgar na-
tionalism. Although the author, James A. Joyce, dated his “Day of
the Rabblement” to October 15 (a week before the Gaiety Theatre
production) and does not name the play, it is certain that he knew
all about the Hyde-Yeats collaboration. Joyce himself had already
31
Although these efforts predated The Twisting of the Rope by a few months, Hyde’s
drama was the first Irish play presented in a regular theater. The distinction of “first
play performed in Irish” depends on how one qualifies it according to place and
circumstance. It seems the honor should go to An Bard ‘gus an Fó (The Bard and the
Knight), a two-scene opera by Paul MacSwiney, staged in Steinway Hall, New York
City, November 27–28, 1884. This mix of romantic and patriotic sentiment, billed
as a “Gaelic Idyll,” featured four speaking parts and a chorus from the Society for
the Preservation of the Irish Language. Cf. Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge,
19. On other precursors staged in Ireland, see note 23 above.
32
Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 6–14, provides a good account of the
brothers’ theatrical training and an evaluation of their crucial but usually uncredited
role in the creation of the Abbey Theatre company.
33
Samhain (Dublin : Sealy Bryers and Walker, October 1902), 3.
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expressed a casual interest in learning Irish, and acquaintances of his
were involved in the Gaelic League. His essay was printed together
with one on the role of women in the university, written by fellow stu-
dent Francis Skeffington, who was soon to marry the sister of a friend
of theirs, Richard Sheehy, who came from a family of ardent nation-
alists with revivalist interests. Joyce’s salutary blast was, therefore, not
produced out of ignorance.34
Ironically, when this young devotee of Ibsen, a Dubliner and lower-
middle-class Catholic, associated Irish cultural nationalism with back-
wardness and “the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe,”
he may have sounded like such crusty supporters of the upper-class
Protestant status quo as Professor J. P. Mahaffy (1839–1919) of Trin-
ity College. Testifying in 1899 before a royal commission on the sta-
tus of Irish in schools, the well-known classicist and mentor of Oscar
Wilde asserted that “it is almost impossible to get hold of a text in
Irish which is not religious or which is not silly or indecent.” Or so he
had been told. Mahaffy himself knew no Irish, beyond a few phrases
that he had found “sometimes useful to a man fishing for salmon or
shooting grouse in the West.” 35
Frank Fay, on the other hand, in his reply to Joyce’s attack, seems
to have missed the point somewhat, mixing up the issues of audience
size, production resources, and aesthetic value. “I have yet to learn
that either the Irish Literary Theatre or the Irish Language move-
ment is popular,” wrote Fay. “Surely they both represent the fight of
34
The two essays were printed at the authors’ expense, in a run of 85 copies,
most of which were delivered by hand to members of Dublin’s literary elite. Joyce’s
review is quoted in Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 65. In a May 1902 review
for a French paper, J. M. Synge recorded a similar revulsion, based on what he per-
ceived as a sacrifice of artistic value in favor of Gaelic League nationalist enthusi-
asm ; see Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland (London :
Routledge, 2001), 31–32. The pacifist and feminist Sheehy-Skeffington (he took his
wife’s name), was shot dead under disputed circumstances during the Easter Rising
of 1916.
35
See Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 45–46 ; Terry Eagleton, Scholars and Reb-
els in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford : Blackwell, 1999), 48 ; and Janet Egleson Dun-
leavy and Gareth W. Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde : A Maker of Modern Ireland (Berkeley :
University of California Press, 1991), 210. Lady Gregory, in Our Irish Theatre, records
her surprise at receiving in 1897 Mahaffy’s £5 contribution for the nascent Irish Lit-
erary Theatre, accompanied by his wish that drama be done in Irish : “It will be as
intelligible to the nation as Italian, which we so often hear upon our stage.”
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the minority against the ‘damned compact majority.’ ” 36 This defense
did not exactly face Joyce’s complaint about lack of dramatic sophis-
tication—even a minority can have bad taste.
A few years later Hyde was to make a more effective response to
the non-aesthetic resistance of Mahaffy and the Trinity dons in a bril-
liant bilingual satire, Pleusgadh na Bulgóide (The Bursting of the Bub-
ble).37 The one-act skit opens in the common room at “Bubble Col-
lege,” where a lisping “Professor Magaffy” is speaking dismissively
of the Irish tongue : “It’s really only a theries of grunts and thqueals
and snorts and raspings in the throat. . . . All our experths say it has
no grammar of any kind.” 38 Suddenly, “an tSean-Bhean” appears
(the Old Woman, a familiar symbol of despondent Irish-Ireland) and,
in the usual folk drama motif, calls down curses when she is finally
ejected. In this case, the affliction the professors most dread befalls
them : forthwith, they can speak only Irish. The satire now shifts lin-
guistic registers as it plays up their consternation. “Mo náire thu a
Mhic Eathfaidh ! Duine-uasal críochnuithe mar thusa, ag labhairt
Gaeilge go díreach mar tréatúr no rebel as an gConnradh na Gaeilge
sin,” wails one (My shame you are, Magaffy, a finished gentleman like
you speaking Irish just like some traitor or rebel out of that Gaelic
League).39 The Lord Lieutenant and his lady, entering just then from
Dublin Castle, assume that Magaffy and friends are speaking Greek ;
when Trinity’s quack linguist finally and with difficulty declares the
tongue Irish (but cannot translate), Her Majesty’s representative bus-
tles off, highly insulted. The Old Woman returns, restores their En-
glish, and delivers lines that might have been actionable had the real
Mahaffy ever understood the original wording : “Ní bhaineann sibh
leis an oileán in ar chuir Dia sibh, tá sibh mar daoine crochta suas
leath-bhealaigh idir an spéir agus an talamh” (Ye do not belong to
the island in which God placed you. Ye are like people hung up half-
way between the sky and the earth).40 After promising destruction,
36
Quoted in James M. Cahalan, Modern Irish Literature : A Chronology (New York :
G. K. Hall, 1993), 147.
37
Produced November 3, 1903, by the National Players ; see Robert Hogan and
James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations, 1902–1904, vol. 2 of The Modern Irish Drama : A
Documentary History (Dublin : Dolmen Press, 1976), 47.
38
Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 136.
39
Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 139, with Lady Gregory’s translation.
40
Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 148, with my translation.
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grief, and death, she departs ; the curtain closes on Magaffy dying as
the Bubble bursts.
Compared with Hyde’s eight other short plays in Irish, the satiri-
cal Pleusgadh na Bulgóide stands out as the boldest political statement
from a man who meticulously practiced restraint in his Gaelic League
rhetoric.41 The other plays center on sentimental folkloric or religious
themes, sometimes combined. An Pósadh (The Wedding), staged at
the Galway festival of August 1902, has Raftery conjure up a feast
for poor newlyweds through his threats of satirizing the neighbors ;
only when he departs does the couple learn that the poet had died a
few days before making his appearance. Close in theme, but comical,
is An Cleamhnas (The Matchmaking), with its familiar structure of a
woman outwitting a threatening male (in this case, an old man who
relinquishes his marriage bid for young Cáit only when she makes her
father demand his beloved poteen still). An Naomh ar Iarraid (The Lost
Saint), also performed in 1903, provided another opportunity for the
recitation of verse, as a young boy miraculously learns a poem thanks
to a blessing from an old ragged man who turns out, in a final epiph-
any, to be its author—the ancient holy man Angus the Culdee.42
Hyde was a clever rather than profound dramatist ; more to the
point, he achieved the goal of raising ethnic consciousness through
41
The political satire of Hyde’s Maistin an Bhearla (The Mastiff of English) was di-
rected at primary education as an institution, rather than at specific individuals. On
the various versions of this play, see Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, 22–23. Dráma Breithe
Chríosta (The Nativity) aroused ecclesiastical concern regarding its mix of dogma and
superstition, and was not produced until 1911. Rígh Seámus (King James), about the
escape of the deposed Catholic monarch, was published in 1904 but not staged—
possibly due to objections from Dublin Castle authorities. See Dunleavy and Dun-
leavy, Douglas Hyde, 225.
42
John Quinn, the New York lawyer and early patron of Irish revivalist writers,
recalled that Hyde dashed off An Naomh ar Iarraid in Irish in an hour or two at Coole
Park one June day, went duck hunting, finished the poem for it the next day, and
read it (translating as he went) to Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Quinn that evening.
See Daniel J. Murphy, “Dear John Quinn,” in Lady Gregory, Fifty Years After, ed. Ann
Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross : Colin Smythe, 1987), 125. This story suggests that the
dramatist had made himself something of an oral poet, composing in performance.
It also explains some of the formulaic quality. The play was performed by the chil-
dren of the Daughters of Erin, York Street ; see Hogan and Kilroy, Laying the Foun-
dations, 123.
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teaching Irish in (necessarily) simple theatrical means.43 The iconic
significance of his art, its ability to bring together powerful person-
alities and diverse ideologies, can be seen in retrospect through such
moments as the staging of his folktale idyll An Tincéar agus an tSidheóg
(The Tinker and the Fairy). A special performance for delegates to
the Oireachtas, the annual Gaelic League festival, took place on May
19, 1902, in George Moore’s garden at 4 Upper Ely Place, Dublin,
with Yeats, George Russell (Æ), and Edward Martyn among the three
hundred guests in attendance, “representative of every shade of reli-
gious and political thought in Ireland,” as one reporter noted.44 The
tinker was played by Hyde—the man who would, thirty-seven years
later, become the first president of the Irish Republic. The fairy,
Sinead O’Flanagan, would one day wed Eamon de Valera, former
gunman and Éire’s third president.
The radicalization of the Gaelic League by a group of younger
members led to Hyde’s resignation as its president in August 1915.
If any drama had contributed to this subversive trend, it was not in
Irish. Hyde had stopped writing plays by 1905, and although his
pieces were by then being performed all over the country (and even
in the United States, in translation), their mixture of humor, piety,
and nostalgia was far from explosive.45 Yeats was more likely right
in thinking that his own patriotic Cathleen ni Houlihan helped “send
out / Certain men the English shot.” 46 And yet the “physical force”
men who instigated armed rebellion at Easter 1916 had been formed
and nurtured not by the Irish Literary Theatre or its successors, but
by Hyde’s Gaelic League. The most promising of them was Patrick
43
On Hyde’s plays as intended for amateur production, see Ernest Blythe, “Gaelic
Drama,” in The Irish Theatre : Lectures Delivered during the Abbey Theatre Festival Held in
Dublin in August 1938, ed. Lennox Robinson (London : Macmillan, 1939), 179–97.
44
Mary Butler, in The Gael ( July 1902), quoted in Lester Conner, “The Impor-
tance of Douglas Hyde to the Irish Literary Renaissance,” in Modern Irish Literature :
Essays in Honor of William York Tindall, ed. Raymond J. Porter and James D. Brophy
(New Rochelle, N.Y. : Iona College Press, 1972), 110.
45
Hyde attended a production of An Pósadh on April 28, 1906, at the Lexington
Opera House in New York City ; see Dunleavy and Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde, 283.
The plays were well received by Irish-American audiences, in contrast to the mixed
reception and even hostility for the Abbey Theatre tour a few years later.
46
“Man and the Echo” in The Poems of W. B. Yeats, new ed., ed. Richard Finneran
(New York : Macmillan, 1983), 345.
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Pearse (1879–1916), like Hyde a teacher, poet, and dramatist. Ap-
pointed to the League’s executive committee when he was barely
twenty, Pearse edited its widely circulated newspaper, An Claidheamh
Soluis (The Sword of Light), from 1903 until 1909. From 1913 on,
Pearse’s speeches began to depict the League as the direct descendant
of the revolutionaries of 1798 and 1803, and of the Fenians of the
1860s. “I have said again and again,” Pearse told a Brooklyn audience
in 1914, “that when the Gaelic League was founded in 1893 the Irish
Revolution began.” 47
Money for guns was one of the unadvertised aims of Pearse’s
American tour, one that events of the previous year had made ur-
gent. The founding of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which openly ob-
tained arms and drilled to resist imposition of Home Rule in that
province, had led to the formation of a counterforce, the Irish Vol-
unteers, with thousands of members from the Gaelic League joining
under the leadership of an original League founder, Eoin MacNéill.
The overt purpose of Pearse’s tour was to collect funds for St. Enda’s
School (Sgoil Éanna), founded by him in 1908 as a bold experiment
in education, bilingual and lay organized. Pearse’s entwining of cul-
tural and revolutionary aims is neatly captured in a letter written
from America urging his wards to study hard : “Remember that the
rifle is still unwon. I want to give it away this summer, but it can only
be given on condition that some boy wins it by a genuine effort to
speak Irish.” 48
Pearse, like Hyde, had learned his Irish when a teenager. Like
Joyce (who once took a few Irish classes from him), he wrote when
young (in 1899) to complain about the tendencies of the Irish Lit-
erary Theatre. Coming not from an aesthetic response like Joyce’s,
Pearse’s objection was linguistic : no true Irish drama could be writ-
ten in English, so Yeats’s society was “an imposture, a fraud, a her-
esy.” Pearse advised, “Let us strangle it at its birth.” 49 His own one-
47
Quoted in Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde : The Dawn of the Irish Revolution
and Renaissance, 1874–1893 (Totowa, N.J. : Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 170. On
Pearse’s ambiguous role in the gradually developing radical wing within the League,
see Brian Murphy, “Father Peter Yorke’s ‘Turning of the Tide’ (1899) : The Strictly
Cultural Nationalism of the Early Gaelic League,” Éire-Ireland 23 (1988), 35–44.
48
Letter of March 1914 in The Letters of P. H. Pearse, 1879–1916, ed. Séamus Ó
Buachalla (Gerrards Cross : Colin Smythe, 1980), 302.
49
An Claidheamh Soluis, May 20, 1899, quoted in Tony Crowley, ed., The Politics
of Language in Ireland 1366–1922 : A Sourcebook (London : Routledge, 2000), 189. Cf.
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act plays in Irish, however, would offer no real alternative to mature
dramatic writing of the sort being done by Synge. Aimed in the first
place at training St. Enda’s students in the language, the four works
also inculcated in his young charges, as cast and as audience, Pearse’s
mystical and heroic visions. An Rí (The King), put on at the school in
June 1912, is no more than a sketch. A nameless but morally compro-
mised Irish warrior is replaced in battle by Giolla na Naomh (Servant
of the Saints), a little boy chosen by the local abbot. He turns away
the enemy but is killed. In a finale dense with liturgical and theologi-
cal symbols, the King kisses the white body of the slain child, prais-
ing the purity that has redeemed his people.50 A similar exaltation
of young innocence and spiritual power concludes Íosagán ( Jesukin),
when a dying old man finds forgiveness because he has been kind to
little children (among them, the anonymous Christ). Beyond offering
roles that could easily be played by boys, such dramas saw virtue in
boyhood itself. The boys got the same message in Pearse’s frequent
exhortations to follow the mythical CúChulainn, who began his he-
roic career at age seven.
Pearse’s finest dramatic production took a wider stage, with a
number of St. Enda alumni in the cast. When he proclaimed the
sovereignty of an Irish republic on Easter Monday 1916 and com-
manded the armed insurrectionists, all knew the finale. A gift for
theater served the revolutionary as it had the schoolmaster. Cú-
Chulainn, who died fighting against hopeless odds, was the hero of
a boys’ pageant at Rathmines in June 1909 ; now he was the model
for those holding the General Post Office against British artillery.
Against the narrative of the Rising, Pearse’s earlier Irish plays look
prophetic. The teacher Ciaran in The Master finally overcomes the
pagan king Daire through holy example (aided by an epiphany of
Michael the Archangel). The poet MacDara, in The Singer, praises
suffering as the task of the teacher and chooses conspicuous death in
Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921 : Ideology and Inno-
vation (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 281. A mature
Pearse conceded that drama in Irish needed much more sophistication than peasant
plays allowed ; see Caerwyn Williams and Ford, Irish Literary Tradition, 316–17.
50
The play was produced as a school fund-raiser in May 1913 at the Abbey The-
atre, with a cast composed of schoolboys, and was performed again in India in 1915
at a school run by Yeats’s friend Rabindranath Tagore. Pearse to Mrs. Bloomer,
April 25, 1913, in Letters of Pearse, 288–89.
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battle as a means of inspiring others : “One man can free a people as
one Man redeemed the world.” 51 At least four others who worked in
Irish-language theater were among the fifteen men executed for trea-
son in May 1916 : Thomas MacDonagh, stage manager for Pearse’s
school plays ; Pearse’s brother Willie, a gifted actor ; Joseph Mary
Plunkett, an associate with Edward Martyn in the Irish Theatre in
Hardwicke Street (a rival to the Abbey) ; and Éamonn Ceannt, a tra-
ditional piper, who once played that part in Hyde’s Twisting of the
Rope.
hybrids and natives
An enthusiast for Irish-language theater, from a vantage point just

before the Rising, might have imagined that a new world of native
drama was dawning. By 1913, Gaelic League play competitions had
been going on for a dozen years, more than fifty original plays in Irish
had been produced, and a steady stream of translations flowed into
Irish of many successful plays written in English, including some fa-
mous Abbey Theatre dramas.52 Although Dublin remained the focus
of such work, Irish dramas could be seen on occasion in the smaller
towns, usually—but not always—produced by the local learners of
the Gaelic League.53 Séamus Ó Beirne (1881–1935), a medical doc-
tor from rural Galway, had successfully toured around villages in
Connaught with an Irish-speaking amateur company, performing his
comedy An Dochtúir, a farce about the linguistic chaos that arises when
a young English-speaking physician, new to town, attempts to diag-
51
Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse : Plays, Stories, Poems, ed. P. Browne (Dublin :
Roberts, 1917), 44.
52
An excellent, detailed overview of the period is provided by O’Leary, Prose Lit-
erature of the Gaelic Revival, 295–328. See also Vandevelde, Alternative Dramatic Revival,
43. Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan had been translated by 1905, and Æ’s Deirdre by 1909,
both by Father Thomas O’Kelly, and were later produced ; Lady Gregory’s Spreading
the News was translated by Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha in 1912. See Vandevelde, Alter-
native Dramatic Revival, 224, 230. The minor successes of Cluithcheoirí na hEireann
(The Players of Ireland, a group formed in 1906 when Pearse, Edward Martyn, and
others joined disaffected actors who had left Yeats’s Abbey) included a production
of Padraic Colum’s The Land, translated by Tadhg O’Donoghue (“Torna”) ; see fur-
ther on their work, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, The Splendid Years : Recollections of Maire Nic
Shiubhlaigh, as Told to Edward Kenny (Dublin : J. Duffy, 1955), 144–45.
53
On the profusion of clubs—social, musical, literary, political—staging amateur
productions, see Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 41–44.
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nose a monolingual Irish-speaking patient. The bilingual play pre-
dates Hyde’s similar Pleusgadh na Bulgóide by a year. Unlike the later
satire, it ends happily, with the citified doctor (whom we are to imag-
ine as Trinity-educated) promising to learn Irish to gratify his new-
found country love, Máirín.54
In 1913 as well, the enthusiast could also point to the recent es-
tablishment of two companies devoted to Irish-language produc-
tions, Na Cluicheoirí (The Players) and Na hAisteorí (The Actors).
Of course, the new companies had immediately set to feuding, but
rivalry, too, could be taken as a sign of artistic health.55 The pinnacle
of achievement for Na Cluicheoirí came in November 1913, when the
group staged Irish versions of plays by Yeats, Gregory, and Ruther-
ford Mayne at the headquarters of Anglo-Irish dramatic forces, the
Abbey Theatre.56 The symbolic power of the event must have reso-
nated widely, for the Irish language movement had always related
to the Abbey with a mixture of resentment, scorn, and awe.57 Typ-
ical was the reaction of “E.O.N.,” who reviewed two plays by Na
hAisteorí put on in April 1913 : “We may all enjoy the Abbey The-
atre and admire it, but unknown to all Gaelic Leaguers it is tyrannis-
ing over us, and silently trampling on our hopes of an Irish dramatic
movement.” 58
Unfortunately, an optimistic enthusiast would have had to over-
look the general artistic poverty of Irish-language plays, compared
with the brilliant productions of Yeats and company. Even promoters
of the genre, like Pearse and Hyde, acknowledged that most would-
be playwrights had little talent for constructing actual drama. It may
be that the age-old Irish genius for storytelling, for emblazoning on
the imagination of peasant audiences all the fantasy that one would
never want to ruin with realism, undercut any theatrical effort. In
oral composition, the narrator’s voice naturally overpowers that of
his characters—a dominance fatal to the entirely different art form
54
See Vandevelde, Alternative Dramatic Revival, 331–54 (text) and 50–52 (com-
mentary).
55
Affiliations to different Gaelic League branches and home counties, and with
members of other dramatic movements (like Martyn’s), helped fuel the disputes. See
Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 46–56.
56
O’Leary, Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 328.
57
O’Leary, Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 330–46.
58
Quoted in Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 46.
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of scripted drama. In a book completed in 1914 and published a few
months before his execution for treason, Thomas MacDonagh, former
colleague of Pearse, noted that writers of plays in Irish “have done
little or nothing towards mastering their craft, and they have failed in
their endeavour.” As a judge of submissions to the annual Oireach-
tas, MacDonagh could testify that “the authors have no conception of
what a play is.” With one exception (which he leaves unnamed), the
plays entered into competition “were for the most part stories or es-
says written in the form of dialogues or catechisms.” 59 The root of the
problem was foreseen as early as 1899, when the Gaelic League pub-
lication Fáinne an Lae (Daybreak), while urging members to produce
“little plays”—preferably melodramatic—observed that “it does not
at all follow that the members who have the greatest ability in musi-
cal or dramatic work are able to speak Gaelic or that those who speak
Gaelic have any dramatic taste.” 60 Even the ultra-nationalist Pearse
came to lament the deficiencies of drama in Irish.61
Most of the Oireachtas playwrights are now forgotten, and their
scripts are rarely found. A few are remembered mostly for their work
in other genres. Pádraic Ó Conaire (1883–1928), whose statue today
overlooks Eyre Square in Galway, produced his Bairbre Ruadh (Red-
haired Barbara) in 1908, and it is back in print. Peadar Ó Laoghaire,
priest and native speaker, was briefly celebrated for his Tadhg Saor
(Free Tim, 1900) and An Sprid (The Spirit, 1903), while Father Pat-
rick Dinneen won praise for An Tobar Draoidheachta (The Well of En-
chantment, 1900) and Creideamh agus Gorta (Faith and Famine, 1902) ;
both men are now better known for their novels, short stories, and
philological labors.62 Philip O’Leary has positively evaluated several
59
Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland : Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish, new ed.
(Nenagh : Relay Books, 1996), 113–14.
60
Quoted in Hogan and Kilroy, Irish Literary Theatre, 55–56.
61
See Hogan and Kilroy, Laying the Foundations, 21. Reviewers were harsher. After
a production of Ó hAodha’s Sean na Sguab, the Belfast Morning News, December 8,
1904, said : “The plays in Gaelic are the more numerous, but, with one or two excep-
tions, are absolutely puerile, and it is amongst the Anglo-Irish plays that dramatic
construction, and literary quality, appear most prominently.” Quoted in Hogan and
Kilroy, Laying the Foundations, 123.
62
Dinneen’s work has been compared with the historical pageant (rather than true
drama), while that of Ó Laoghaire is said to reflect the fact that he had no theatrical
experience. See Caerwyn Williams and Ford, Irish Literary Tradition, 316.
104
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serious realistic works of the period, such as Lorcán Ua Tuathail’s Lá
an Cíosa (Rent Day, 1903) and Séamus Ó Duirinne’s Ar Son Baile agus
Tíre (For Home and Country, 1905). The majority of dramatic at-
tempts, however, were not up to this level, finding comfort instead in
patriotic visions of history or melodramatic evocations of rural life.63
A major barrier, evident early on, was the cultural gap between
urban actors and the reality of Irish rural life. When the Irish Na-
tional Theatre staged Synge’s Riders to the Sea in 1904, for example, the
soft skin slippers called pampooties were shipped to Dublin from the
Aran Islands for authenticity, accompanied by an islander to advise
the clueless actors on how to walk in them. The traditional lament
called for in the play was also a novelty. Lady Gregory succeeded in
tracking down an old woman from Aran, who had no English, living
in a tenement off Gardiner Street in Dublin. The actress Maire Nic
Shiubhlaigh (Mary Walker) later recalled the resulting impromptu
tutorial : to elicit the proper keen—something the cast had never wit-
nessed—they pretended a real funeral was in progress and watched,
fascinated, as the old woman, eyes closed, arms outstretched, head
thrown back, swayed chanting, “tá se imighthe uaim go deo go deo”
(he’s gone from me forever).64
Such moments confirm the impression that Irish-speaking cul-
ture—as much as was left—had its own performance traditions and
needs, alien to the urban theatrical world. Even Synge, who spoke
the language and knew the rural West, could not hope to create mu-
tual understanding between the two sides of the island. He had once
spoken of putting on plays using Irish speakers from the Blaskets, off
Kerry, but his ill health and his hectic involvement with the Abbey
meant that the plan never materialized.65 In 1901 and again in 1904,
Lady Gregory and George Moore spoke of taking Irish-language
plays into the hinterland, but nothing came of their discussions. Lady
Gregory’s neighbor Edward Martyn proposed a touring company in
1907, perhaps inspired by the relative success of Alice Milligan’s 1899
tour through Irish-speaking villages in Ulster with the famous one-
scene Passing of Conall.66 It never happened. In July 1914, Na hAisteorí
63
O’Leary, Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 194–200.
64
Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 56–58 ; Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years,
54–55.
65
M. Murphy, “Lady Gregory and the Gaelic League,” 159.
66
Vandevelde, Alternative Dramatic Revival, 47–49, 79.
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staged plays in Macroom, Skibbereen, and other spots in the Irish-
speaking areas of Cork, on their way to the Oireachtas in Killarney,
and the company had plans to regularize such provincial visits. But
the Great War and, later, the Rising and Anglo-Irish War (1919–
1921) intervened.67
In the dramatic world of the Free State, tendencies visible before
the Rising and Civil War became more marked. On the one hand,
theater in Irish continued its didactic function, upholding for urban
audiences a picture of homey and pious country life that was becom-
ing outmoded even in the rural heartland. The politics of nostalgia
encouraged this trend. As practiced especially by Eamon de Valera
(president of the Dáil before the Civil War of 1922, prime minister
for most years from 1937 to 1959, and president of the Republic from
1959 to 1973), this ideology demanded that the rescue movement of
the Gaelic League become state policy, with education in the native
language compulsory and proficiency in it required for civil servants,
soldiers, and police.68 On the other hand, there were modernizing
efforts to introduce more cosmopolitan theater to the Gaeltacht (Irish-
speaking area), now a significant symbolic space by turns venerated
and neglected by Dublin-based governments.
The nearly schizophrenic condition of the new nation pulled liter-
ature in Irish, including drama, askew. A remarkable flowering of au-
tobiographical writing, centered on authors from the Blasket Islands
(Peig Sayers, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and others), looked back to an
innocent, albeit impoverished, past, while Galway writers like Pá-
draic Ó Conaire and the brilliant Máirtín Ó Cadhain brought mod-
ern psychological realism to bear on traditional themes.69 Both direc-
tions converged in one regard : the strong preference for prose—short
stories, essays, and the novel—followed by poetry (the other tradi-
67
Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 54.
68
On the characteristics of the de Valera era, see Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ire-
land, 147–77. On language policy, see Neil Buttimer, “Language,” in Ireland, 1921–
1984, ed. J. R. Hill, vol. 7 of A New History of Ireland (Oxford : Oxford University
Press, 2003), 538–73.
69
On these and other twentieth-century writers, see Philip O’Leary, Gaelic Prose in
the Irish Free State, 1922–1939 (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press,
2004) ; Máire Ní Annracháin, “Literature in Irish,” in Ireland, 1921–1984, ed. J. R.
Hill, vol. 7 of A New History of Ireland (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003), 573–
86 ; Caerwyn Williams and Ford, Irish Literary Tradition, 282–89.
106
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tional mode of Irish expression). Drama ran a poor third, as was to be
the case for the rest of the twentieth century.
Seán Ó Faoláin, the bilingual short story writer, remarked in 1925
that there was “not a single serious drama” in Irish.70 In 1939, Ernest
Blythe, a promoter of the Gaeltacht while minister in the first Free
State administration, could write : “Drama in the Irish language is
still in its infancy. There are only a few original plays of merit ; there
is no Gaelic company of professional actors ; and the public follow-
ing for plays in Irish is small, though not quite so small as that which
supported the Abbey when I first went to see the early plays of Yeats,
Synge, and Lady Gregory.” 71 In 1962, the actor and director Micheál
Mac Liammóir wrote, “The existence of Gaelic drama is, at the mo-
ment of writing these words, still a dream.” 72 And looking back from
2003, Máire ní Annracháin noted the very small number of plays ac-
tually produced in Irish : “Drama in general has not developed with
the vigour that might have been expected, given its obvious suitability
as a medium that could draw heavily on the spoken language and the
oral literary tradition.” 73
In analyzing the scattered successes and dogged survival of dramas
in Irish over the last century, what strikes one most is the hybrid na-
ture of playwright, players, and plays. Far more than in the fields of
prose or poetry, those involved with drama continued to come from
the ranks of educated non-native speakers. Blythe (1889–1975), for
example, the conservative and controversial managing director of the
Abbey from 1941 to 1967, was a Protestant from Lisburn in the North
who learned Irish from de Valera’s future wife, Sinead O’Flanagan,
while a young member of the Gaelic League. He was interned at vari-
ous times from 1914 through 1916 as a member of the Irish Repub-
lican Brotherhood (into which the future playwright Sean O’Casey
had recruited him). Like Douglas Hyde, he became more fanatic
about the Irish language than most who had it from the cradle.
70
He also found “not a solitary work of literary criticism,” as he stated in an ar-
ticle for The Irish Statesman, November 14, 1925 ; cited in Lyons, Culture and Anarchy
in Ireland, 161.
71
Blythe, “Gaelic Drama,” 179.
72
Micheál Mac Liammóir, Theatre in Ireland (1950 ; repr. with sequel, Dublin : Cul-
tural Relations Committee of Ireland, 1964), 64.
73
Ní Annracháin, “Literature in Irish,” 579.
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In 1928, Blythe was instrumental in securing government subsi-
dies for the first permanent Irish-language theater, Taibhdhearc na
Gaillimhe.74 The leading figure in the success of this Galway estab-
lishment was another remarkable “hybrid,” Micheál Mac Liammóir
(1899–1978).75 Born in London and christened Alfred Lee Willmore,
he developed an Irish identity, as did many others, through attend-
ing Gaelic League classes. He continued acting (which he had begun
as a child) on moving to Dublin as a young man. Acquaintance with
Hilton Edwards led to their collaborative production at Taibhdhearc
in August 1928 of Mac Liammóir’s first play, Diarmuid agus Gráinne
(Diarmuid and Grainne).76 Although he claimed to have translated
it from his initial Irish version, it appears the process went the other
way. At any rate, the drama was successfully transferred (in the origi-
nal English version) the same year to Dublin’s Gate Theatre, which
the playwright had recently co-founded with Edwards. Revivals of
the Irish version took place in 1931, 1953, and 1978 (the year of Mac
Liammóir’s death).
Mac Liammóir worked for four years in Galway before taking over
the direction of An Comhar Drámuíochta. This group was the main-
stay of Irish productions in Dublin, having been formed in 1922 by
playwright and actor Gearóid Ó Lochlainn, building on the prewar
Na hAisteorí. A government subvention enabled it to put on plays
several days each month at the Peacock, the Abbey, or the Gate. A
typical season for An Comhar in the 1930s might include two plays
74
See his account in Blythe, “Gaelic Drama,” 187–90.
75
For a useful summary of his career, see R. J. Clougherty Jr., “Micheál Mac
Liammóir (1899–1978),” in Irish Playwrights, 1880–1995 : A Research and Production
Sourcebook, ed. Bernice Schrank and William W. Demastes (Westport, Conn. : Green-
wood Press, 1997), 175–81, from which I cite these details.
76
See further Mac Liammóir, Theatre in Ireland, 33–34. Taibhdhearc continues
today to produce on average five plays in Irish each year, takes at least one on a
national tour, and has a flourishing youth theater group ; see www.antaibhdhearc
.com. Since 1928 it has staged a number of original Irish plays by Hyde, Ó Conaire,
Pearse, Piaras Béaslaí, Críostóir Ó Floinn, Walter Macken, and Eoghan Ó Tuairisc.
Proportionately, it has hosted more productions of Irish translations, both of Anglo-
Irish and international drama, from Molière, Shakespeare, Synge, and O’Casey to
Agatha Christie and Neil Simon. See the production list for the years 1928–1970 in
Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 191–212. By 1962, 234 Irish plays had issued
from the state-run publishing house An Gúm, of which nearly half were translations.
See Caerwyn Williams and Ford, Irish Literary Tradition, 318.
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from the developing Irish-language canon (Hyde or Ó Conaire, for
example), a play apiece by Anton Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill, done
into Irish, translations from lesser-known Spanish playwrights, and
original works by Piaras Béaslaí or Máiréad Ní Ghráda. The riskier
repertoire also called for some skilled actors who happened to be non-
native speakers, to the chagrin of language purists like Séamus Ó
Grianna : “It’s bad enough for us that the Gaeltacht is vanishing,
without a flock of simple Yahoos ( yahoos mhacánta) without mouth or
tongue stammering on stage and trying to convince us that they have
the language of our ancestors.” 77
With the increasing influence of Blythe at the Abbey, an agree-
ment was reached to produce a limited number of plays in Irish each
year in the iconic “national” theater. The energies of the An Comhar
group were gradually absorbed this way, but from the mid-1950s the
number of Irish plays declined sharply, the result of practical factors
and Blythe’s puritanical tastes. During some years in the 1960s one
could see only a revival of a Douglas Hyde or Lady Gregory chest-
nut and the traditional Christmas pantomime.78 The “new” Peacock
and the avant-garde Damer Theatre, both in Dublin, filled the gap to
some extent, with a few new plays each year by younger Irish writers
that attracted audiences tending to the bohemian. It seems, however,
that the general public attitude was captured by the inveterate the-
atergoer Joseph Holloway, who favored marginalization for native-
language works. “All three Directors [of the Abbey] have the Gaelic
bee in their bonnets,” he wrote in 1943, “and behave like children
in foisting Gaelic plays on the Gaels who have no love for sitting out
Gaelic plays. I hope that the season’s failure to create an audience for
such plays may put a little sense into the heads of the directors. . . .” 79
In the long run, his advice was heeded.
The most famous “hybrid” to have Irish-language plays produced
was Brendan Behan (1923–1964), a third-generation Dubliner. His
early career resembled that of Piaras Béaslaí, the playwright at the
heart of Na hAisteorí and later An Comhar, who had fought in the
77
Quoted and translated in Philip O’Leary, “At the Cow’s Rump or in the Na-
tional Theatre ? Issues in Gaelic Drama, 1922–1939,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic
Colloquium 14 (1994), 139.
78
Production list for the years 1938–1970 in Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge,
183–90.
79
Quoted in Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 86.
109
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Rising at Easter 1916 and served time in jail. Behan, too, was arrested
twice for activities tied to the Irish Republican Army. As it has for
several generations of political prisoners, the experience enabled him
to improve his Irish.80 Although he had learned some of the language
in a Christian Brothers school, his immersion came at the Arbour
Hill internment camp, where he befriended Seán Ó Briáin, a teacher
from Kerry and native speaker. In a short time, Behan memorized
all one thousand lines of the classic eighteenth-century Irish satire on
rural sex and marriage, Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheadhan Oidhche
(Midnight Court). He wrote poems in the language with the encour-
agement of yet another prisoner, Máirtín Ó Cadháin.81
It may have been imagined comradeship with another former
rebel, Irish enthusiast, and prisoner, namely, Ernest Blythe, that led
Behan to write to the Abbey director in May 1946, informing him
that he had written part of a play in Irish (the rest in English) called
The Landlady. A few years later (now a free man), Behan submitted
to Blythe a one-act play in Irish, Casadh Súgáin Eile (The Twisting of
Another Rope). An ironic allusion to Hyde’s peasant play, this draft
dramatized the preparations for a prison hanging from the point of
view of men in the cell block. Blythe rejected it with the comment
that Behan might “some day write a play.” The three-act English
version that Behan then made from the Irish was turned down when
he refused to consider revisions.82 The play went on to a month’s run
in 1954 at Alan Simpson’s Pike Theatre Club in Dublin, under the
new title The Quare Fellow, before becoming an international success
in London.83
Behan’s London producer, Joan Littlewood, also staged his next
play, The Hostage, in 1958. In this story, an English soldier is ab-
ducted to be used in exchange for IRA men about to be hanged ;
80
Note, for example, the excellent education in Irish literature received by Pádraig
Ó Fathaigh while in Lewes Prison in 1916. Pádraig Ó Fathaigh’s War of Independence :
Recollections of a Galway Gaelic Leaguer, ed. Timothy G. McMahon (Cork : Cork Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 44–45.
81
Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan : A Life (Dublin : Blackwater Press, 1997),
108–14.
82
Details in Séamus De Búrca, Brendan Behan : A Memoir (Newark, Del. : Prosce-
nium, 1971).
83
On the uses of Irish language and ideology in the play, see Richard Rankin Rus-
sell, “Brendan Behan’s Lament for Gaelic Ireland : The Quare Fellow,” New Hibernia
Review 6 (2002), 73–93.
110
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he is then accidentally killed in the safe house/brothel where he is
confined. This drama, too, Behan first wrote in Irish. Unlike Casadh
Súgáin Eile, it was produced in the original language, as An Giall, at
Dublin’s Damer Theatre in June 1958—an interesting signal that the
playwright had gained status. Behan’s nationalism seems to have de-
manded that he write in Irish as a gesture of patriotic resistance, but
the process also may have worked to articulate more economically his
essential, powerful ideas. Transformed into English, they could then
progress to being fitted out with music and joking. A fragmentary
third Irish play, Lá Breágh san Reilg (A Fine Day in the Churchyard)
formed the basis of Richard’s Cork Leg, which Behan left unfinished at
his early death.
The slim distinction between “hybrid” and “native,” it turns out,
is largely a matter of self-presentation, depending on one’s preference
for country or city. Writers who identify primarily with the Gael-
tacht rather than Dublin are numerous, although their works are not
well known beyond regional audiences. Sean Ó Tuama, Eoghan Ó
Tuairisc, and Séamas Ó Néill, all popular novelists, also wrote for the
theater, as did Liam O’Flaherty (best known for the novel that be-
came a film, The Informer ). Críostóir Ó Floinn, a native of Limerick,
has balanced English and Irish productions throughout his career,
with his most popular plays translated into one or the other language
by himself (such as Cóta Bán Chríost/The Order of Melchizedek, 1966).84
More surprising are well-known personalities associated with an
urban intelligentsia, whose careers include an Irish-language play or
two. Cyril Cusack (1910–1993), for example, was born in Kenya, stud-
ied at University College Dublin (with the satirist Brian O’Nolan),
and left in 1932 to join the Abbey Theatre. His first play, Tar éis an
Aifrinn (After the Mass), was acted for one night in January 1942,
produced by An Comhar Drámuíochta. Sean Ó Riada (1931–1971),
best known as a classically trained composer and traditional musi-
cian, wrote Spailpín a Rún (The Whistling Gypsy) about the life of
poet Eoghan Rua Ó Suilleabháin and played the piano each night
at the Damer, where the show was produced. Máiréad Ní Ghráda
(1896–1971) was raised in an Irish-speaking area of Clare, studied
under Douglas Hyde at University College Dublin, and became the
84
See Caerwyn Williams and Ford, Irish Literary Tradition, 319 ; Ó Siadhail, Stair
Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 154–63.
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Opening page of Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s play for children, An Circín Rua [The Little
Red Hen] ([Dublin] : Brún agus Ó Nualláin, [1930]). Rare Books Division, Depart-
ment of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Gift of
Leonard L. Milberg.
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first female radio announcer in Ireland or Britain. She won an Abbey
award for her Giolla an tSolais (Youth of Light, 1954) and shocked the
conservative with An Triail (The Trial), a courtroom drama about an
unwed mother, produced at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964.85
Philip O’Leary wrote a dozen years ago that “despite notable and
noble efforts like those centered in Dublin’s An Damer Theatre in the
50’s and 60’s . . . Mac Liammóir’s vision of a Gaelic theatre and its
audience maturing together in a mutually challenging aesthetic part-
nershp . . . remains utterly unfulfilled today.” 86 If the situation is im-
proving at all—and there are few signs—it may be because a genera-
tion of writers has come of age for whom Irish was never compulsory
in order to receive a school-leaving certificate (the requirement hav-
ing been dropped in the mid-1970s). Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, a cele-
brated Irish-language poet born in 1952, once noted her agreement
with playwright Frank McGuinness’s view that compulsory Irish had
been “the language of our humiliation and our pain,” especially when
teachers needing to control unruly kids would use it to get the upper
hand. Not only was Irish the language of poverty and hunger (as it
had been since the eighteenth century). In mid-twentieth-century Ire-
land it was, she recalled, “the language of civil servants, school in-
spectors, the bureaucracy, the culchees who come up from the country
and go into the civil service and are out to get the rest of the popula-
tion.” By Ní Dhomhnaill’s generation, “it was as if a very conserva-
tive, middle-class, middle-aged, almost geriatric class of people had
taken it upon themselves to monopolize Irish and be associated with
it.” 87 Her decision to write in Irish rather than English (her first lan-
guage) was a conscious challenge to that state of affairs.
Not many Irish playwrights seem to have taken Ní Dhomhnaill’s
route. The distinctions of genre are significant : plays need paying
audiences in a way that poems do not, and the social situation in
which Irish could be found in the 1930s through 1960s did not readily
provide them. Cathal Ó Searcaigh (born 1956), a brilliant poet and
dramatic writer from the Donegal Gaeltacht working exclusively in
85
On her career, see Eileen Morgan, “ ‘Unbroken service’ : Máireád Ní Ghrá-
da’s Career at 2rn, Ireland’s First Broadcasting Station, 1927–35,” Éire-Ireland 37
(2002).
86
O’Leary, “At the Cow’s Rump,” 149–50.
87
Quoted in James P. Myers Jr., ed., Writing Irish : Selected Interviews with Irish Writ-
ers from the Irish Literary Supplement (Syracuse : Syracuse University Press, 1999), 105.
113
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Irish, often about homoerotics, is one who may have found a solution
similar to Ní Dhomhnaill’s. He has also a theatrical base (An Grianan
Theatre, Donegal), thus providing some hope for future Irish-as-
resistance playwrights. Of his several controversial plays, Oíche Ghealaí
(Bright Night, 2001) evokes Oscar Wilde’s Salome, with a twist in the
form of two gay court jesters. He has alluded to the jester role as a per-
sona for the playwright himself.
Paradoxically, the most recent and promising Irish dramatic phe-
nomenon echoes the oldest native motives for the genre : wise instruc-
tion from the margins, that territory of jesters, upstaged, but never
88
Alongside the wealth of English-language plays in the Leonard L. Milberg Irish
Theater Collection, there are examples of several of the Irish-language categories
mentioned in this essay : a rare children’s play by Máiréad Ní Ghráda, apparently
from the 1920s (An Circín Rua, call number 2004-2727n) ; Cusack’s Tar éis an Aifrinn
(2005-0613n) ; and a translation into Irish of Martin McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of
Leenane (Banríon Álainn an Líonáin, 2004-0987n).
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Martin UpstagedIrishDrama 2007

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Martin UpstagedIrishDrama 2007

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Princeton University Library

Upstaged: Irish Drama in Irish

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“We are anxious to get plays in Irish,” W. B. Yeats wrote in 1900,

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The emotional high point of the little comedy is in fact a poetic

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hybrids and natives

An enthusiast for Irish-language theater, from a vantage point just

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